audio books for kids

[omelette]

Can anyone recommend some audio books that would be appropriate for a 4.5 yr old. He loves for me to tell him stories in the car when we are driving and there are days when I just don't have it in me to tell one more story so I was thinking that having some audio cd's in the care would be great.
I checked itunes but didn't come up with much, not sure if I just didn't word it properly. Any reco's? And where would I get them?

[Daffodil]

Your library probably has quite a few to choose from. Our library has actual audio books we can check out and also gives us access to a couple of websites where we can download audio book files. Some (mostly older classics) can be burned to CD, and some can't. Is he used to listening to chapter books at home? There are picture book audio books, but you'll probably find more chapter book ones. My 4.5 year old likes Magic Treehouse, Secrets of Droon, Junie B. Jones, and Stink (none of which are great literature.) Higher quality choices we've found at the library include Charlotte's Web, The Wizard of Oz, Winnie-the-Pooh, Betsy-Tacy, and books by Beverly Cleary,. My 4.5 year old recently enjoyed the audio book of Henry and the Clubhouse, by Beverly Cleary. (Coraline is really good - fun for adults, too - but it's pretty scary. It is suitable for a 4 year old though, if you have one like mine who likes scary stuff. Cornelia Funke's Ghosthunters series could also appeal to a kid like that.)

[Red Pajama]

My twins are 5 and a half, and haven't been exposed to the cartoon Pooh. We got the audio books of pooh, and they really loved it.

Shorter books I recommend are the skippy john jones books.

[34me]

We love the library for this. We don't allow anything but audio books in the car, even for long trips. We have checked out the whole harry Potter series, treasure Island, Charlottes Web, and many more. Inkheart took us through all of the Black Hills....

[mommariffic]

We got the Little House series on cd for longer car rides, and I think we all enjoy it although my curious DD asks 1049 questions so I have to pause it a lot.

[omelette]

Maybe I'll start at the library; I'm just so terrible at getting things back before the due date.
We just finished reading 'A bear called Paddington' and we are now reading Charlotte's Web. He loves to be told stories orally so I think the audio books would be a hit.
Off to the library tomorrow.

[3boobykins]

We love audiobooks at our house--dh does audiobook post-production, I do quality control, so they are pretty much our life/living. For downloads, I recommend audible.com. You pay about $15 month for a membership, which gives you one credit per month, or one book, but additional downloads for members are much cheaper than cd's. That's a really good price for long books, which can be very pricey on CD. We mostly check them out of the library for the kids, though. They love a lot of the books mentioned above. Yay for audiobooks!

[sunnygir1]

I don't know many, but I want to get some for my dd, too.

When I was a child we had Hans Brinker and the Silver Skates, but I bought the book for my niece, and the language is so old-fashioned sounding that I think we must have had an adaptation rather than an unabridged version. Anyway, we wore the tape out listening to it thousands of times.

The other one we had that I adored and we listened to until it wore out was The Velveteen Rabbit. That one was unabridged, I think. The original language of that story is beautiful. We fell asleep to it every night for a long time.

[tbone_kneegrabber]

My local library allows me to "check out" audiobooks online, depending on the title they can be transfered to an mp3 player, listened to on the computer, or burned to cd. They automatically "delete" themselves from the computer where they were downloaded after 21days, so no need to return them! You are *suppose* to "destroy" any cd's you burned after 21 days as well, but somehow I don't think they are going to find out I still have "Is your Mama a LLama?" on cd around here somewhere!

[tbone_kneegrabber]

you can also google "free audio books for kids" and get some decent results.

[limabean]

Originally Posted by omelette

I checked itunes but didn't come up with much, not sure if I just didn't word it properly.

Did you check podcasts too or just audiobooks? Storynory is a free story podcast for kids. There might be more since the last time I checked.

[tbone_kneegrabber]

Originally Posted by limabean

Did you check podcasts too or just audiobooks? Storynory is a free story podcast for kids. There might be more since the last time I checked.

: I remember looking up podcasts for kids stories and there were quite a few. Not necessarily classic stories you know, sometimes originals.

[tine1973]

we use audbile.com - a lot of the kid books are quite cheap. The Cat in the Hat is actually a whole series of Seuss books, and we like Little Bear, and Sylvester and the Magic Pebble too. We aren't in the car long so our audio books tend to be short!